Life is filled with fleeting moments. A baby’s first steps. A first kiss. Graduating from high school. A 25th-anniversary dinner.
Social media has allowed us to share these short but BIG moments with our friends. So others can experience the highs in our lives and connect with us.
But there’s a flipside:
When we share these significant moments, they stay shared forever. Our special moments become less significant because they become permanent fixtures of our social media. Do the first steps of our baby really belong beside status updates about what we ate for lunch or what we watched on TV last night?
Our fleeting moments are no longer so short on social media. They exist til we say otherwise.
Enter Snapchat.
Snapchat became popular because of its lack of permanency. Users send each other photos which self-destruct after being viewed.
When the app was first released, many people couldn’t get their head around it. Why wouldn’t they want to keep their photos? Skip forward 5 years and Instagram and Facebook have released their own tools for temporary content.
So why does temporary content work so well?
Because it can make those fleeting moments special again. We can experience them, share them, then they disappear and are allowed to become memories.
Once more we can look back at milestones with fondness and nostalgia. Rather than be reminded of them time and again when we go on our social media.
Temporary social media posts also have an allure to them. They remind people that what they’re seeing is right now. Not something that happened last week.
Next time an amazing event happens, in your life, or even at your business, consider using Instagram or Facebook Stories to document it. Give your followers a chance to connect.Create some happy memories of your own.
